The God of Coding, Becoming an IT Conglomerate

6. Computer Research Society (2)

A man stood in front of the law school from the wind in the morning.

“Oh. I should have asked your name. What time is it now?”

He was Kim Jin-taek of the Computer Research Society.

I was waiting in front of the main gate of the law school early in the morning to meet a law student who turned the club upside down yesterday.

The rather chilly weather at the end of March made the long wait painful.

Kim Jin-taek was shocked to see the code the law student had corrected yesterday.

It was obvious that the use of precise and perfect functions and neatly written codes were not at a level that could only be achieved by studying for a day or two.

In fact, he was proud of being the best in Korea in terms of coding ability.

Although I entered the Department of Electrical Engineering, I was more interested in computer science than electronics, and I spent most of my waking hours coding.

‘It’s on a different level.’

However, the law student code he saw was on a different level.

If you look at the code someone has written, you will see traces of the author’s worries and anguish.

Can’t we make it more efficient? Wouldn’t it be eating up too many resources if it was operated this way? etc.

However, the code did not show any signs of distress.

Rather, it felt like knowing all the correct answers and going straight along the road.

‘If a person with such skills joins, we can successfully complete the project we are currently working on.’

Jintaek was currently working on a project to build a word processor with three other members of the Computer Research Society.

It was intended to disrupt the word processor market already dominated by Microsoft’s Word.

It was possible to create all characters by applying one byte character that was not suitable for the Korean market within the ASCII code of 250 characters.

However, in order to use Hangul, which is two bytes per character, the file format from the input/output had to be refreshed to use the word processor normally.

And this explanation was exactly what the law student had said yesterday.

“Uh! Uh! Law student!”

how long did you wait

Ho-young, whom Jin-taek had been waiting for, finally appeared in front of the law school.

Jintaek exclaimed with joy.

However, at Jin-taek’s cry, everyone who entered the law school turned around.

“Oops…”

For a moment, Jintaek, forgetting that most of the people entering the building were law students, shuddered with shame.

After class, Ho-young found someone shouting, ‘Law student!’

The man had a very red face, but it was a familiar face.

“Senior Jintaek?”

“What’s your name?”

“My name?”

“I need to know my name so I won’t be called a law student from now on.”

“This is Yun Ho-young.”

Kim Jin-taek slowly examined Ho-young’s face.

A good impression in his clear eyes and a smile on his lips gave me a sense of trust.

“…pass.”

“yes?”

“It’s our club pass.”

Hoyoung laughed inwardly.

it’s pass

“When did you start studying programming? What languages can you handle? How many programs have you made so far? Can you show me if you have any?”

Jin-taek, who couldn’t even guess Ho-young’s heart, started asking questions like a storm.

“Senior. Can I ask you one by one?”

“Oh yes sorry. Sorry.”

“Programming… 30… No, I did it for about 3 years.”

Ho-young naturally tried to say 30 years, but realized that he could be treated as an idiot and lied to him as 3 years.

Jin-taek seemed to pass naturally.

“Let’s go to the club room with me right now.”

“I have to attend a lecture today. I will go to the club room after class.”

“Can’t we bounce for just one day today?”

“no.”

Hoyoung said firmly.

Attendance was the most related to grades, so absenteeism was unthinkable.

“Instead of that, I’ll tell you everything you want to know later.”

Disappointed, Jin-taek’s expression relaxed again at Ho-yeong’s words.

Seeing Jin-taek’s expression like that, Ho-young remembered the past.

I just liked programming, so I thought of the days when I didn’t care about night or day.

.

A few hours later, after all the lectures were over, Hoyoung went to the computer research club room.

In the club room, Lee Jin-chan and Kim Jin-taek were waiting for Ho-young along with other club members.

“I’m here?”

Lee Jin-chan’s attitude toward Ho-yeong was quite different from yesterday.

Lee Jin-chan introduced the other two other than Kim Jin-taek as Woo Hyung-jin and Kim Won-shik.

Hoyoung knew that all three of them, except Kim Jin-taek, would later have a place in the IT industry.

Despite their tired looks, their eyes were shining.

“First of all, to be honest, I’d like to accept you as a member of our team. I’m guessing you’re as good at programming as we are… honestly better than us.”

“A team?”

“You know from looking at the code, and seeing as you’ve even debugged it, I think you have a perfect understanding of what we’re trying to do.”

“We are trying to develop a Korean-style word processor.”

“Exactly. We started this project a year ago, and now I think we’re making some progress. Maybe six months from now at the earliest. I think the work will be finished in a year at the longest.”

Jin-taek’s prediction was accurate to a certain extent.

Originally, it was around April 1989 that the beta version, version 0.9, was announced.

But now there is a way to definitively push the release date.

If a programmer with a sufficient understanding of the program and a great skill is added, the release time will be accelerated.

Simply adding one person does not reduce the amount of work to be done from 1/4 to 1/5.

If the synergy between each other is sticky, 4+1 can become 10.

At that time, Lee Jin-chan focused on the conversation.

“But with your help, I’m sure we’ll be able to pull that period even further.”

Lee Jin-chan, who spoke resolutely, was ready to kneel.

Lee Jin-chan added one more word to that.

“And we’ve been thinking about it, but we won’t think about the year we started first. When you come in, we’ll divide the stake equally into 1/5.”

Hoyoung didn’t bother to express himself at Jintaek’s suggestion, but he was a little surprised.

In my previous life, there was a common saying that many older developers said.

‘The IT industry is an industry that grew with passion rather than money!’

‘Back in the day, we coded overnight for a week without getting any money, but these days, there’s no passion!’

Every time Hoyoung heard this, he thought it was just old school boys selling memories.

However, to the extent of asking people who are new to it to share the shares fairly, I could feel how much they like programming.

“Can you look at this?”

Jin Taek and Ho Young called to the monitor.

On the monitor, there was not only the code written by Jintaek, but also the code that everyone else wrote.

It was clumsy, but it looked like a program to some extent.

As if possessed by something, Hoyoung began to sift through the program code from the beginning.

It was a code that exceeded thousands or tens of thousands of lines, and it was a sentence that needed to be interpreted line by line, but Hoyoung kept pressing the down key lightly.

Hoyoung thought that it was really inconvenient to not have a mouse wheel in this era, and spent hours looking at the sources.

Several hours later, Hoyeong finally opened her mouth after reviewing all the programs.

“Hmm… You did a really good job. To the extent that the beta version could be completed with a little improvement. However, there are a few big problems.”

“The problem? What do you think the problem is?”

Four men, who had been waiting with bated breath for several hours as Hoyoung looked at the sauce, approached Hoyoung.

He must have been madly curious about what the problem Hoyoung was talking about was.

“Are you using three keys to divide documents into parts, convert them into metadata, and then index them?”

“right.”

“Increasing search efficiency is, of course, an essential item to consider, so it’s good to try. And it handles this in a recursive way. Hmm… Is recursive the right way? No. I do the most inefficient process to increase speed efficiency. ?”

“We know that, but usually home and business systems choose recursive because of RAM size.”

In that moment, Hoyoung realized again that the present year is 1988, not 2025.

In the future, personal PCs with 32 GB, 64 GB, and even 128 GB of RAM existed.

However, at this time, only 256KB of DRAM was being used.

‘Myungsung Semiconductor grew explosively at this time.’

Myeongseong reaped profits of more than 320 billion won in one year, an amount that was unimaginable at this time, and laid the foundation for the next-generation semiconductor supremacy.

When Hoyoung thought of fame, he felt a tendon build up on his forehead, but he desperately controlled his mind and focused on talking with the computer research club members.

“I didn’t think of the system specs. But is that all? Could it be an unintentional bug? If all three keys overlap in two or more parts at the same time, what number are you going to separate and index them?”

“that···.”

“If recursive is applied here, looping will start, so this should be avoided. Also, what is the reason for having three keys?”

“I thought you could distinguish all the cases with three?”

“Hmm… who can prove that? Heuristic method? No. This would potentially endanger the program.”

“Then how many should I do?”

“nOverview. It’s better to determine the key by continuously changing it dynamically, rather than by a fixed number. Record this number in the metadata.”

“ah···!”

At Hoyoung’s words, everyone felt like pouring cider down their throats.

I was even awestruck when I saw Ho-young, who had been thinking about it for months, grasping at once coolly the contents of the handshake.

“Let’s start by writing the club membership application form. I’ll submit it to the club meeting tomorrow.”

Jintaek took out a club application form made of coarse paper from one side of the bookshelf.

After receiving the application form, Hoyoung wrote down his name and student number.

But I haven’t handed it over to Jintaek yet.

“Is this just a big white paper?”

At Hoyoung’s request, Hyungjin Woo brought a piece of clean A4 paper.

Hoyoung took the paper, wrote three letters at the top of the paper in large letters, and called Jintaek again.

“Senior. If you want to receive a club membership application form, there is one more thing to receive together.”

“What?”

Hoyeong held up the A4 paper and showed it to Jintaek.

“Because it’s our loyalty or friendship, why don’t we have a contractual relationship?”

At the top of the A4 paper, these three letters were written in large letters.

‘contract’